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By: ChloeF,
on 4/18/2014
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By Chloe Foster
We have seen an abundance of Very Short Introductions (VSI) authors appearing at UK festivals this year. Appearances so far have included at Words by the Water festival in Keswick, Oxford Literary Festival, and Edinburgh Science festival. The versitility of the series and its subjects means our author talks are popular at a variety of different types of festivals. First up, Words by the Water:
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The perfect scenery to accompany a day of VSI talks at the Words by the Water festival
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The beautiful backdrop to the Words by the Water festival in Keswick
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Richard English is introduced before his talk on Modern War
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Robert Eaglestone at the signing table after his talk on Contemporary Fiction at Words by the Water in Keswick
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Klaus Dodds gets on his Geopolitics soapbox at Oxford Literary Festival
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Keith Grint captures the crowd with his talk on Leadership at Oxford Literary Festival
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Jonathan Herring's soapbox on Family Law at Oxford Literary Festival
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Jamie Woodward's soapbox on The Ice Age at Oxford Literary Festival
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William Allan's Classical Literature Soapbox at Oxford Literary Festival
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The backdrop to Edinburgh Science Festival
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Russell Foster prepares for his talk on Sleep at the Edinburgh Science Festival
Later this month, we’ll have talks from VSI authors at Chipping Norton Literary Festival on the 26th and 27th April. This is followed by a series of talks at Ways with Words festival in Devon on the 12th July, Kings Place festival in London on the 14th September, and Cheltenham Literature festival from 3rd -12th October.
The Very Short Introductions (VSI) series combines a small format with authoritative analysis and big ideas for hundreds of topic areas. Written by our expert authors, these books can change the way you think about the things that interest you and are the perfect introduction to subjects you previously knew nothing about. Grow your knowledge with OUPblog and the VSI series every Friday, subscribe to Very Short Introductions articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS., and like Very Short Introductions on Facebook.
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Subscribe to Very Short Introductions articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
The post Very short talks appeared first on OUPblog.
Usually going to Cheltenham is a stately affair, where one gets set up in one's hotel room, has a little wander around town, does one's event or two, then has a long dinner, maybe drinks, before retiring to bed. Nope, nope, not this year; it was ALL ENGINES GO from early this morning morning til I just crashed back through the door at home about an hour ago. But I was rather curious to see my photos, so here I am at the computer already.
Ha ha... I told Axel Scheffler that every time I get a photo with him, he looks freaked out. So this time we make a special effort.
I did a lot of commiserating with Axel's Gruffalo, or the lovely lady who got kicked and mauled while she steamed away inside the costume. (Because after all, the Gruffalo is a monster, so if you're a kid, you have to fight it, right?)
Here I'm having a hard-core political discussion with a darling chappie named Alistair... (I had to grab this shot because I knew Stuart wouldn't be much impressed by all these book people, but this one might make him do a double-take. And it worked! Now he wishes he'd come along.)
I got a bit shy about getting a photo of Julia Donaldson; she'd already signed books for two hours so I didn't want to hassle her. But no one told me how many hours Lauren Child had been signing (probably just as many), so I took the liberty of snapping this trio (reviewer and Guardian columnist Julia Eccleshare, Lauren, and publicist Philippa Perry).
It's kind of hard to tell what's going on in this event photo and it looks like total mayhem, but really, people are making stuff, it's all good. The event sold out and we made lots of noise and drew adventure board games and everyone seemed to go away happy, so hurrah. I noticed quite a few kids drawing shark attacks on their railway game journeys... maybe sharks are an imminent threat when you live around Cheltenham.
Here's fab illustrator Mei Matsuoka, whom I interviewed on this blog a couple years ago, when she was still traveling in from Tokyo to meet with her London-based editor. You might know her for her books The Great Dog Bottom Swap and Great Sheep Shenanigans (the latter which qualifies her for honourary Fleece Station membership).
The great thing about these festivals is getting to meet new people, and this time it was Louie Stowell, who wrote The Usborne Write Your Own Story Book. She knows loads about comics and grew up reading stuff like 2000 AD, and I'm hoping she'll start coming along to London's Comica Social Club at the Royal Festival Hall. (Another woman in comics, hurrah! The next two meetings are 26 Oct and 30 Nov.)
Louie Stowell and Usborne publicist Amy Dobson
I spoke briefly with political cartoonist Stev
If someone had asked me, which writers would you like to see gathered all in one place? Wish hard! Well, yesterday at the Times Cheltenham Festival of Literature went a long way toward fulfilling my wish. On the train back, I was reading my newly purchased graphic novel by Audrey Niffenegger, The Night Bookmobile, which wraps itself around the joys and perils of finding a book heaven, and yup, that's Cheltenham. And not only were there amazing books and book creators milling about, but we got to make comics!
I was dead chuffed to see the Vern and Lettuce poster I'd designed displayed prominently all over town. I'm really proud of it.
Click on the pic or here to see an enlarged version.
I led two events, one of which was a two-hour comics workshop. We went for BOLD cover designs, based on an earlier workshop I did for HyperComics in Battersea Park. We had some great results!
I didn't manage to get many photos of it, but before the participants made their own comics, we got our stories moving with an interactive Comics Jam session. Here's one, starring a slug, that made me laugh:
Panel 1: 'Good evening, garçon, a glass of Chardonnay, please.' 'Sacré bleu! A SLUG!!'
Panel 2: 'Can I at least get takeaway?' 'And don't come back!'
Panel 3: 'Cool' [Slug World: NO PEOPLE] Panel 4: 'Mmm, tasty slime juice. Better than Chardonnay.'
I was very taken with this wine-glass chandelier at the Hotel du Vin:
The best part about these festivals are the people you meet: catching up with old friends and meeting new ones. Here's the wonderful Ben Haggarty, who works as a storyteller; despite the fact he's used to telling stories, not writing them, he came up with the text for the most magnificent book of the year (and quite possible the best one, too), Mezolith.
'Mezolith', published by David Fickling Books in the DFC Library series. Storyteller Ben Haggarty with his partner Katie
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For weeks I'd been looking forward to dinner the night before events, with people from my fab David Fickling and Scholastic team, and with Martin Brown (whom I'd met for the first time at the Edinburgh lit fest) and Damian Kelleher, who's done a bunch of graphic design work with me. In theory, it's an easy journey to Cheltenham Spa from Birmingham (where I'd done a signing at the British International Comics Show). But I hadn't reckoned with the abyss of failure that is Birmingham New Street station. When I realised I was
By:
Lynne Chapman,
on 10/13/2010
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At last: time to share some of what I got up to last week.
My run of school visits, all of which were good fun (especially the fabulous Sawley Juniors - hi guys!), were topped off with a weekend of family events at Grantham and then Cheltenham.
Saturday's Red House Book Award party was lovely: a gentle afternoon with some of the children in the Grantham Children's Book Group area. I got to meet two other author/illustrators too: Jonathon Emmett and Adam Stower, both Red House winners.
Adam Stower and Jeanne Willis won this year, with the very silly Bottoms Up! featuring the line: 'Do calves put on bras to hide their bazoomers?' We illustrators get to draw some daft stuff!
We three talked a bit about our work and answered children's questions. My most surreal question of the week actually came from a child at Ladygrove Primary on Friday: 'What's your favourite number?'. I think said '382'.
Then the children were divided between us and we each did a workshop. I practised my Bears on the Stairs routine: it takes a little while to really 'warm up' a book and I think I'm about there now.
Adam I had a bit of a wait at the station for our trains home and we spent a lovely half hour or so in the cafe, looking through each other's sketchbooks (his is BRILLIANT - often quite eerie and always beautiful).
On Sunday morning I was up early for a train to Cheltenham Spa for my Cheltenham Festival event to promote Bears on the Stairs:
It was a bit of a whistle-stop, but I still enjoyed myself enormously. I was relieved that it was really well attended (I think we crammed about 80 children in!). ![]()
Here's the inked version of the programme for Cheltenham lit fest:
I left the pencil in blue, you can can catch glimpses of a few things that have changed from the original pencil version. So Vern and Lettuce and the gang from Pickle Rye are starting to get excited about their big road trip in October.
Hey, I just got a great e-mail from a new teacher about Morris the Mankiest Monster that totally made my day!
Dear Sarah,
I'm taking my PGCE at Kingston University and saw you when you came in to talk to us about animating and picture books.
I just wanted to write to thank you, Giles Andreae and Morris the Mankiest Monster as I used the book for a job interview, the book went down a storm and I will now be teaching year 2 at a great school! I had borrowed the book from my housemate who had also used it in an interview where she was successful too so Morris is now our lucky, if a little disgusting, house mascott :o)
Best wishes,
Mel Lawrence
I was so curious about how she'd used Morris in an interview, and she wrote back:
Thank you! Of course you can blog the comment - I'm telling everyone to use Morris for interviews :o)
I was asked to share a story of my choice for 10mins so I read the book and asked the children to mime disgusted faces whenever they thought something was a bit foul and then we made up our own character called Gregory the Grubby Gremlin... One of the Governors who watched came up to me at the end to tell me about his daughter who used to eat her bogies, it was brilliant :o)
...Thanks so much, Mel! :D
So exciting!!! I got an e-mail from Cheltenham Literature Festival organiser Jane Churchill, who invited me to be the Book It! Illustrator for the festival in October. I can hardly believe it, other people who have done it in the past are some of my most favourite illustrators, including David Roberts, Polly Dunbar and Chris Riddell. And I had an amazing time at last year's festival.
That means I'll get to make a picture that will go on the brochure, banners, flyers, etc, and I asked if I could do my Vern and Lettuce characters and they said yes! So I've just sketched out a first version to see what they think. You might see a lot of changes, but I thought I'd post them as I go along. (And I'm very glad for any feedback, I want this picture to look the best it can!)
I'm starting out with a little wobbly go-cart type thing, like the Pickle Rye gang are setting off for the festival, but getting a bit lost (as they would). Here are Polly Dunbar's and Chris Riddell's from earlier years:
(They're cheltfestivals on Twitter if you want to follow. The festival runs 8–17 October.)
Stuart and I decided to make a holiday weekend of our trip to the Cheltenham Literature Festival, and our friend Garen Ewing was on the same panel with me, and brought along his wife Ellie, so we had a great time. On the panel, I got to meet writer of the graphic novel Salem Brownstone, John Dunning and the slightly shy but very lovely and funny host, Kieren Phelps (who'd just a couple nights previously been presenting the annual Cheltenham Illustration Awards, where Simone Lia and Tom Gauld had given the keynote speech.) Here's a link to Garen's write-up of the event.
I felt a little funny plugging a picture book when the panel was about graphic novels, but I showed a lot of my comics work, including my Vern and Lettuce strip for The DFC. Most of the audience questions were about making their own comics: how to get their comics published, Photoshop techniques, whether it's possible to make a career of making comics, etc. I briefly mentioned my studio and when I said I shared with Gary Northfield, the guy who creates Derek the Sheep for the the Beano, I saw a kid in the front row jump about a foot and suddenly he was all ears, heh heh.
The great thing about literary festivals is that you never know who you're going to run into. I got to meet the usually elusive Lucy Cousins, creator of the beautiful and boldly graphic Maisie books:
Lucy Cousins & me with our books; Maisie in the kids storytelling tent
I had a couple of my own Morris the Mankiest Monster books in my handbag, and I ended up giving one to Lucy and one to Cherie Blair, who was waiting with me in the Writer's Room before our talks. Cherie said, 'oh yes, Giles is the Purple Ronnie guy!' and went through the whole book, laughing, then blanching at the page where Morris looks at the potatoes growing out of his pants. She was really nice, I hope her talk went well.
Stuart picked a couple talks for us to go to, so we went to a panel about spooks and spying which included Stella Rimington, the person who held the real job behind the character of James Bond's 'M'. I was slightly annoyed at the academic dude on her left who kept interrupting her, but it was great to hear her talk. Just a background note, I met Stuart while he was working for the British Embassy in Moscow, so we're familiar with a lot of the places and job positions that often come up in spy novels.
Stella Rimington at the signing table; you can just see writer Kate Mosse, the seated blond in the background
We also got to hear a great talk by John Irving about his latest novel, Last Night in a Twisted River, and about the discipline of writing. He talks a lot like my dad, taking a long time to pause and think after each question, and answering in a somewhat pedantic way but delivering lots of thoughtful insight. He talked about how he likes to work backward when he writes, getting a very solid idea about the book's ending, then figuring out how far back the book should start. I took loads of notes, so ask me if you ever want to know more about what he said, but one thing that made me laugh was when he said, When you start writing, the piece of paper doesn't know who you are; the paper is unimpressed. Heh heh, even John Irving gets the Terror of the Blank Page.
John Irving
I went into one of the tents to try out the new Sony Readers. Still not convinced I want one, but I had loads of fun drawing alien graffiti on Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and drinking their free hot chocolate.
We crashed at lunch time in the refreshments tent and Stuart read the paper while I drew monsters with the kids at our table:
They had fun reading through Morris and being grossed out in all the right places. The girl made a fun mucky mess of the table with some rain water she and her brother had collected from one of the fountains, then I got to meet their dad, a Times features writer named Damian Whitworth, who introduced us to his friend, Times journalist Ben Macintyre, someone I've always been a bit curious about because of his last name.
After our event on the first day, we went out to celebrate Ellie's birthday with a dinner at an ornately decorated Thai restaurant.
Ellie and Garen Ewing
I almost ordered this dish because it seemed very in keeping with the manky Morris theme:
We had lots of veggies carved as flowers and now that I'm an adult, I'm allowed to play with my food:
Here's a nice photo of which my mother will approve:
The other pic is Ellie and me posing next to Cheltenham's rabbit and minotaur, which at night-time look like something out of Donnie Darko.
We went on a walk around town before heading off; it was great to see someone's taken on the DFC and given it new life:
And we popped into the Cheltenham Art Gallery & Museum and saw this fabulous, macabre chimney sweep:
And didn't hang around long enough to find out how to become friends of the local Pig Insurance society, maybe next time.
And a last one of Stuart, the star of our show...
Thanks, all your people who made this festival happen!
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Well done Lynne. It looks like the same venue I had last year at Cheltenham. My event had a poor turn out, which was a bit of a shame - and it's a big room!! x
It's so unpredicable, isn't it? At least with a school group you've a guaranteed audience (although I once had one where the teacher forgot to bring them, so it seems nothing's certain in this world!)
Lynne,
You are a nice lady!
Why, thank you kindly, Bob!